Data privacy is a problem of growing concern in exchanges of information over the World Wide Web, and particularly in electronic commerce (e-commerce) conducted over the Web. Enterprise Web sites prompt users to input various items of personal information as a prerequisite to providing information or supplying goods to the users. Needless to say, uncontrolled use of this information can subject the user to unwanted consequences, ranging from nuisance e-mail to fraud.
In response to the need to protect private information, Web sites have begun to establish and post their own privacy policies. Visitors to such sites are invited to check the privacy policies upon entering the site, in order to know in advance how the private information that they disclose will be treated. To facilitate this process, the World Wide Web Consortium has undertaken the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), which is described at www.w3.org/P3P. P3P is envisioned as an industry standard for providing a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information on Web sites they visit. It provides a standardized set of multiple-choice questions, covering major aspects of a Web site's privacy policies, in order to give a “snapshot” of how a site handles personal information about its users. P3P-enabled Web sites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). P3P-enabled browsers can read the policy snapshot automatically and compare it to the consumer's own set of privacy preferences. If there is a mismatch between the site's privacy policy and the user's preferences, the user then has the option of not conducting further business with the site.
While P3P specifies a convenient way for Web site operators to inform visitors of their privacy policies, it is not meant to address the questions of how such policies are to be managed and enforced within the enterprise that operates the Web site. Existing tools for privacy policy management provide only rudimentary functionality. The most advanced tool for this purpose of which the inventors are aware is the Tivoli® SecureWay® Privacy Manager, which is described at www.tivoli.com/products/index/secureway_privacy_mgr/index.html. The SecureWay Privacy Manager is an extension to the access control capabilities of the Tivoli SecureWay Policy Director for electronic business (e-business), which is offered by IBM Corporation (Armonk, N.Y.). The SecureWay Privacy Manager provides the following capabilities:                It centralizes administration of enterprise privacy policies to help enforce access to personal data.        It defines and allows modification of privacy roles and categories of data for e-commerce, for use in implementing and administering access controls.        It supports “dynamic roles,” enabling access decisions to be made based on the relationship between the person requesting the data and the type or subject of the data.        It uses authorization services provided by the SecureWay Policy Director to keep access control consistent across the entire enterprise.Neither Tivoli nor any other privacy management tool known in the art, however, offers a structured solution to managing variations in privacy policy that may be implemented in different parts of a single enterprise or changes in privacy policy that may occur over time.        